IRC-ing on AIX with EMACS ERC

Emacs ERC (M-x erc) is a IRC client built into newer releases of EMACS.

To build this you need the bos.adt sets and a compiler (gcc or xlc will do just fine).



Remember to set TERM=dtterm for colors :-).

VMware ESXi Hypervisor Now Free

After making VMware Player and VMware Server available for free and the VMware toolkit open source under a GPL license, VMware now makes VMware ESXi Hypervisor available at no cost.

SedTris - a Tetris game written in sed.

I've seen irc clients written in sed and I've seen a lot of sed magic in my time, but this is just ridiculous...

A Tetris game written in sed.

http://uuner.doslash.org/forfun/sedtris.sed

Sun announced intentions to release SunWebServer under BSD license

Sun will opensource part of their web stack under a BSD license.

"Sun announced that it is open sourcing the core components of the Sun Java(TM) System Web Server 7.0 and Sun Java(TM) System Web Proxy technologies under a BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) license in the Web Stack sub-project of the OpenSolaris community. The Web and Proxy source code will be available in CY08Q3."

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/webstack/

"We're pleased to announce that the Web Stack project will be taking on the Open Source releases of the Sun Web and Proxy Server.... under a BSD license. Read about this and other plans in the Sun press release"

Microsoft Reaserch Singularity Project - Open Source on Codeplex

You can grab the source code of the Singularity OS RDK - a Microsoft Research project from codeplex (Microsoft's version of SourceForge for Open Source Projects Hosting). It's basically an OS written mostly in managed code. It also uses a microkernel.



Running the thing is pretty simple. Just build world and run the ISO in VirtualPC.

Puttycyg, screen, zsh and irssi on Windows

Remeber PowerShell + PowerTab + PCSX + Console + Terminus?
Here's something even nicer: Puttycyg + Terminus + GNU Screen + ZSH + irssi:

AWK tricks - clearing the screen and scrollback buffer.

You can put this in your logout profile to fill up the screen buffer (clear just won't do on some systems with a multiple page console scroll-back buffer).

Filling the screen buffer with new lines:

awk -F 'BEGIN{ for (i = 1; i <= 3000; i++) printf "\n"; exit}'

See also:

http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq7.html#ConsoleClear

D-Light DTrace script for Sun Studio 12 in Solaris

Here's a pretty cool tool for developers, similar to the DTrace GUI from XCode in OS X 10.5 Leopard (Instruments):

It's part of Sun Studio 12.




It's still in development, but it can be pretty useful.

Using AWK to convert UNIX passwords from HP-UX to Solaris

Converting password hashes from HP-UX 11.11 to Solaris is pretty simple if you are using UNIX crypt passwords (if HP-UX isn't a Trusted System. If it is, it will use bigcrypt passwords, > 8 characters, converting them to Solaris UNIX crypt could be problematic).

Here's the gest of it:

On the HP-UX System, we create a test user:

# useradd test
# passwd test
test

Now we convert the passwd file to generate passwd entries for Solaris:

• # awk ' BEGIN { FS = ":" } { print $1":x:" $3 ":" $4 "::/export/home/" $1 ":/usr/bin/sh" }' /etc/passwd
• test:x:107:20::/export/home/test:/usr/bin/sh

And we create the shadow file entries, including the password hash:

• # awk ' BEGIN { FS = ":" } { print $1":"$2"::::::" }' /etc/passwd
• test:lsDWJo7M.iAhY::::::

Just add them using /usr/ucb/vipw to the password file, edit the shadow file for consistency and test. Be sure to backup the files and to test using a few users at first.

• $ su test
• Password:
• $ id
• uid=127(test) gid=120
• $ whoami
• test
• $ echo $HOME
• /export/home/test
• $ echo $SHELL
• /usr/bin/sh

Mix with some shell scripting and mkdir's and you're set :-). Next time, use LDAP :P.

Tru64 UNIX AdvFS open sourced

HP Tru64 UNIX's filesystem has been open sourced under a GPLv2 license.
http://advfs.sourceforge.net/

Press release here.

Documentation here.

What is it with UNIX giants making filesystems open source?